When comparing MacPorts vs Growl, the Slant community recommends Growl for most people. In the question“What are the best power user tools for macOS?”Growl is ranked 16th while MacPorts is ranked 52nd. The most important reason people chose Growl is:

In addition to all the applications that other people have written that support Growl, Growl includes several 'Extras' that serve various functions.

Cons

Con

As MacPorts eschews Apple-supplied libraries and links sources against its own a large duplication of functionality across MacPorts and Apple libraries can be found.

Con

Bad at limiting dependencies

MacPorts has a habit of pulling very specific versions of dependencies for each package. It downloads different version of already existing dependencies even in cases where the existing dependency version would have worked seamlessly.